Gartner has its figures for PC sales. Worldwide, Asus and Lenovo seeing lots of growth, Dell and HP losing lots of sales, Apple doesn't register in the top 5. Overall, the market remained flat. If you take a narrow view of the world and only focus on the US, things look different. In the US, everybody loses, and only Apple sees minor growth. All this excludes tablet sales, but considering people are hammering on and on and on about how it's a post-PC device, I think it makes sense to exclude it. You can't have your cake, and eat it too. Then again, who cares.

Frankly, dual-core is plenty for most users. I'm surprised your father even managed to get up to 45% utilization. Perhaps he was running a web browser, in which Javascript had hung one tab (100% of one core), and another tab was running Flash (80% of a second core).

And actually, the OEMs still haven't gotten themselves out of the MHz-war mindset. They are still overbuying on CPUs and underbuying on other components. (I suppose that's why Intel is still making boatloads of money.) For example, cutting $20 off the CPU budget for a given configuration would pay for a hybrid hard drive, which would greatly improve the user-perceived performance.

But then, OEMs have always made strange decisions when it came to system configuration. I remember in 2003-2006, it was quite common to find a configuration with: (1) a gigantic hard drive (2) not enough RAM (3) Windows XP Media Center Edition (4) no TV tuner. Why did they preload XP Media Center if the computer didn't have a TV tuner? They should've instead preloaded XP Home and spent the savings on more RAM.

In the Vista/7 timeframe, it was quite common to find OEM-preloaded DVD playback software on systems with Windows Home Premium. This also made no sense, because they were paying the DVD licensing fees twice. The savings from cutting out the duplicate licensing could've paid for the removal of most of the preloaded crapware, which again would have dramatically improved the user experience.

No, I won't be shedding any tears for the OEMs. They dug themselves into their own hole. It's true that they faced a brutally-competitive market, but they made enough boneheaded decisions to destroy their own margins.